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Filmmaker and Navy veteran David Ayer launders his fondness for the military experience into an unexpectedly intimate two-hander about wilderness survival with “Heart of the Beast.”
Nimbly directed and often unfolding in real time, the Cameron Alexander-scripted film stars Brad Pitt as a Special Forces vet of wounded valor who winds up marooned in the grand, beautiful, pitiless Alaskan vastness with his highly skilled, three-legged German Shepherd after a plane crash. Helpful spoiler alert: The dog does not die. But we know that from the film’s first moments, where regally handsome military vet canine Odin (played by a very impressive screen dog named Uber) stands alone on a wooded road, staring down the female driver of a truck with imploring, sentient eyes.
Well-executed set pieces of survival, whether traversing a rickety log over vicious white waters or fending off a stalking pack of wolves, make for a compelling yarn about braving the elements in America’s tippy-toppest state. But then the movie ultimately, in the sepia-toned visual language of military recruitment ads and a reaching-for-majesty voiceover to boot, crashes out into what feels like both military agitprop and an urgent call to stand beside our “fallen brothers” of war. That underhanded (and eventually blunt) inclusion of patriotism doesn’t make “Heart of the Beast” a bad movie, however, and it will probably help propel this surprisingly small film to a higher-ranking Cinemascore with mainstream audiences. It’s the intimate scale of “Heart of the Beast” that makes it work, and sink in.
The prevailing pro-militaristic current is not unexpected from the director of the immersive LAPD procedural “End of Watch” and World War II drama “Fury,” which are better comps here than more recent Ayer films like “The Beekeeper” and his dip into DC, “Suicide Squad.” “Heart of the Beast” is a deft showcase of Pitt as a lone survivor, as he’s in every frame of the movie and quite often alone. It’s also a decent showing of Ayer’s ability to hold close on the often banal particulars of surviving disaster. Fortunately, the film’s late-act didacticism and overall earnest intentions don’t undercut what’s often exhilarating filmmaking around a strong lead performance. It reminds you that Pitt is still a movie star.
The film’s lack of a buttressing backstory, however, does prove an undoing in the sense that we have no idea why James Belmont (Pitt) is literally flying solo, in a Cessna plane, years after a vaguely indicated Middle East war left him with PTSD. PTSD that’s pinpointed via rote, sped-up flashbacks that feel vaguely like a parody of Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s “Warfare,” the most recent movie to effectively capture the spinning shrapnel inside a war-torn mind. Perhaps James is looking to get his joie de vivre back, or some peace of mind, but he’s got his trusted dog Odin (Odie, as James sometimes calls him) at hand, a dog that would be so stately if not for the fact that one of his four legs is bionic. Another casualty of war, as Odin heralds from the battlefield, too. Both James and Odin have terrible nightmares that involve waking up screaming, despite being in a tent surrounded by bucolic splendor. Clearly, this man has no people, only this creature.
After arriving in somewhere, Alaska, James’ self-care solo sojourn is disrupted by a surly fellow traveler (J.K. Simmons), who warns of imminent weather. Storm’s a coming indeed. But it’s not clouds or rain that bring James back down to Earth from his plane, but instead a harrowing medical event that results in his plane crashing through the forest, Odin ripped out of its fuselage and tossed into the trees. Don’t worry. Again, as I said, the dog does not die.
But James and Odin have to find their way back to each other, in fashions that director Ayer and cinematographer Mauro Fiore capture with extreme patience. Even at just over 100 minutes, “Heart of the Beast” isn’t an especially thrillingly paced action movie. We spend a lot of time watching James swim back down to the wreckage of his plane, slowly, to the best of his ability, severing seatbelts and security straps to get to emergency supplies. Or nursing his own wounds that get increasingly worse as the stakes get higher, and scarier. This film is, in that way, almost experimental in its commitment to observing James go through the very slow motions of making your way out alive. But again, these are survival skills that James acquired via the Army, and the movie does not let you forget that.
There isn’t much more to “Heart of the Beast”: most of the dialogue is James talking or muttering to himself, or speaking to the dog, as he crosses 50 miles of perilous territory to get back to a main road. And indeed, much peril is inflicted upon the dog amid real-time-like stretches of survival mayhem and across tawdry war flashbacks. The dog is invincible and adorable. Even a large, hulking, howling bear does not stand an inch of a chance against Odin. “Heart of the Beast” is often just on the verge of vaunting in something magisterial, like voiceover ripped from the pages of “White Fang” by Jack London. But the visible, palpable, real bond between James and Odin (and then, of course, Pitt and Uber) would take a heart of stone not to be touched by.
“Heart of the Beast” is a red-blooded movie seemingly aimed squarely at middle American audiences who can appreciate the overall militaristic point of view as well as the positioning of its attractive movie star working in a register of maximum machismo. But it’s also a bit sweet and oddball in its affection for the man-animal connection, especially for anyone who’s felt a closeness to a pet. Pitt’s steeliness and willingness to survive (and seemingly do many of his own stunts) also make for often powerfully compelling viewing.
Ayer locates the pain and pathos beneath Pitt’s hardening exterior as a once-marquee movie star who is now, one could argue, bristled and bruised by insert-extratextual-reputation-stain or mar on some of his recent filmography choices. He’s quite good here, though, in a movie that’s better than it needed to be. A movie whose message is tricky. Military patriotism isn’t all that’s on its mind, exactly, but it isn’t not. But you can also just enjoy “Heart of the Beast” as a nice story about a man and his very good dog.
Grade: B-
Paramount Pictures opens “Heart of the Beast” in theaters on Friday, September 25.
English (US) ·